The Hub

News, Notes, Talk

The short story that broke the internet will soon be a movie starring Nicholas Braun (?!).

The viral short story is dead, long live the viral short story: The Hollywood Reporter has announced that StudioCanal and Imperative Entertainment are working on a new feature adaptation of Kristen Roupenian’s famous short story “Cat Person,” which sparked widespread Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Exclusive cover reveal: Melissa Febos's craft-book-meets-memoir, Body Work.

Melissa Febos, whose essay collection Girlhood was called “exquisite [and] ferocious,” is publishing a new craft book with Catapult in March 2022—and Lit Hub is pleased to reveal the cover for that book, Body Work. Catapult describes Body Work as “a brilliant exploration of how Read more >

By Literary Hub

Here are the best reviewed books of the week.

Jonathan Lee’s The Great Mistake, Kai Bird’s The Outlier, Nathan Harris’ The Sweetness of Water, and Ruth Scurr’s Napoleon all feature among the Best Reviewed Books of the Week. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s “Rotten Tomatoes for Read more >

By Book Marks

7 absent fathers in fiction.

The other day, I sat down to watch What a Girl Wants. In case you were living under a rock in the early 2000s, the film follows a young Amanda Bynes, the daughter of a hippie wedding singer, who dreads watching Read more >

By Katie Yee

This prestigious German TV writing competition is . . . very German.

Recently I was thrilled to learn of Writers Unplugged, a writing show in Bhopal, India where local writers compete in challenges. I love both writing and the constant human surprises of reality television, so when I heard today that Austria Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Let Tom Hiddleston read your kids a bedtime story.

Tom Hiddleston—the devilishly handsome English actor best known for his role in Terence Davies’ harrowing 2011 film adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 stage play about a tortured affair between an RAF pilot and the wife of a high court judge, Read more >

By Dan Sheehan

Janet Malcolm, brilliant, boundary-breaking journalist, has died at 87.

Janet Malcolm, author of the groundbreaking and controversial The Journalist and the Murderer (first sentence: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally Read more >

By Emily Temple

The New Yorker Union has averted a strike.

After more than two and a half years of negotiations with Condé Nast, The New Yorker Union, as well as the Pitchfork and Ars Technica Unions, have averted a strike and negotiated new conditions for their workers. Some of the Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Sarah Polley is adapting Miriam Toews’s Women Talking and the cast is perfect.

Two of my favorite living artists are collaborating and I couldn’t be happier. Sarah Polley has come onboard to adapt Miriam Toews’s brilliant, disquieting 2018 novel Women Talking, about a group of women in a rural religious community coming to Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

It appears Padma Lakshmi is celebrating Hot Poet Summer by smooching Terrance Hayes.

I’ve long waited for the day that my Top Chef/poetry fanfiction would be realized IRL, and it appears that day has arrived. And friends, it is glorious. It appears that ageless host and cookbook author Padma Lakshmi is celebrating New York’s Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Move over, tea controversy—turns out Jane Austen’s brother was an abolitionist.

Recently, a series of clickbait articles started by The Telegraph claimed that Jane Austen had been “canceled for drinking tea” and was “under historical interrogation.” That was not the case. In fact, scholars and museums have been trying to parse Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Even Jared Kushner has a book deal now.

Oy vey: the Associated Press has reported that Jared Kushner, son-in-law of Donald Trump and top official of . . . Donald Trump, has signed a book deal with HarperCollins’s conservative imprint Broadside Books, to be released in 2022. The Read more >

By Walker Caplan

"They're old and outdated. That's the truth." Little Richard on why the critics should shut up.

Picture it: Ali MacGraw as a working-class Radcliffe College student and Ryan O’Neal as a preppy Harvard student and hockey player. These two crazy kids come from opposite worlds but, surprise surprise, they fall head over heels in love. In Read more >

By Vanessa Willoughby

Shakespeare quotes, rewritten for business school.

Yesterday, Twitter learned that UNC Chapel Hill was hiring a lecturer to teach courses in both Shakespeare and business writing (at a rate of… $8,000 per course). Of course, if the university really wanted to streamline operations, the two could Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Listen to Jeff Daniels narrate a new Dave Eggers story.

Calling all Dave Eggers and Jeff Daniels fans alike: the two have teamed up for the audio release of Eggers’ new story, The Museum of Rain, published this month by McSweeney’s and Scribd Originals. Check out a brief excerpt below, Read more >

By Corinne Segal

Attention, dictionary nerds: here is list of words with surprising shared etymologies.

It’s finally happening. We’re re-entering casual society en masse, which means we’re going to need some better small talk than “Did you cut your own hair or just let your hair grow?” And since I find that etymology can actually Read more >

By Jessie Gaynor

Are we entering the era of a wholly separate “conservative” publishing industry?

Today’s big conservative* publishing news is all about Donald Trump’s book, which—in the manner of Canadian girlfriends everywhere—may or may not exist; but amid all the bluster and puffery comes news of a conservative publishing house called All Seasons, named Read more >

By Jonny Diamond

Is Elon Musk a Philip K. Dick fan?

One of the perks of the digital age is that we have unprecedented access to the thoughts of incredibly powerful people. Never before have we been able to intimately experience the president’s thoughts on Coke or Cher’s thoughts on . Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Watch Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. trade insults on live television.

On this day in 2008, in an interview with The New York Times, when asked to comment on conservative commentator William F. Buckley, Jr.’s passing, the legendary Gore Vidal said that “hell is bound to be a livelier place, as Read more >

By Walker Caplan

Trump says he’s written “the book of all books”. Publishers are skeptical.

Alas, Trump news: the former president, in a . . . well . . . Trumpian statement, has announced out of nowhere that he is writing “the book of all books” and he is “writing like crazy.” Journalist Maggie Haberman Read more >

By Walker Caplan